Leo XIII
The first papal election by the Holy See since its loss of temporal power, following a third ballot on February 20, 1878 the papal conclave elected sixty-eight-year-old Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci as Pope Leo XIII. Despite being of poor health, “he was to run the church with remarkable efficiency for over a quarter of a century.” As the former Bishop of Perugia, few held high hopes for his reign as pope, but he quickly managed to repackage his predecessor’s atrocious policies, such as the notorious “Syllabus” and the austere terms of the Vatican Council, as if they were more benign:
“Leo spoke with a voice of calm, of reason and regret. Why was the Kingdom of Italy so hostile? Surely the Church should be a friend, not an enemy. Had it not led humanity out of barbarism and into enlightenment? Why, then, was its teaching rejected? As anyone could see, that rejection was causing nothing but lawlessness ad strife. If Italy would only return to the Catholic fold, all her present troubles would vanish” (418).
Across Europe, the Franco-Prussian War had tilted the balance of power away from Catholic Austria and toward Protestant Prussia. Throughout Germany, particularly in Bavaria, tensions were heating up between a burgeoning Catholic political party and an outraged body of Protestants who despised the “Syllabus” as well as the doctrine of papal infallibility. With the help of an odious figure named Dr. Adalbert Falk, Otto von Bismarck instituted the Kulturkampf (or “Culture Struggle”) which gave rise to the Falk Laws and expelled the Jesuits as well as subjecting all Catholic educational institutions to a series of rigid state controls and expressly forbade discussions of politics from the pulpit. In response, Pope Leo struck a reconciliatory tone and Bismarck, who had faced rioting over the anti-Catholic restrictions, was only all-too eager to abandon the laws (the banishment of the Jesuits remained in effect until 1917).
In France, however, anticlericalism was just getting started. Following the horrors of the Paris Commune, several senior Church figures publicly executed by firing squad. The reaction was a decade-long repressive conservative backlash before a radical mood once again struck back, barring Jesuits from their religious houses and secularizing all primary education. Additionally, young women were now permitted to be educated and divorce was allowed for the first time. Again, in response the pope struck a reconciliatory toe, claiming that Catholics could support the rising spirit of republicanism while also opposing anti-Catholic laws. Then came the November 1894 French treason conviction against Jewish Colonel Alfred Dreyfus and his life sentence on Devil’s Island. The ceaselessly antisemitic Catholic right predictably campaigned against Dreyfus –even condemning him after he was pardoned in 1906. Venomously malignant Catholic publications circulated widely, perpetuating lurid conspiracies in the likes of La Croix as well as Civilta Cattolica, the latter of which had perpetuated, only a few years prior in 1881 and 1882, unhinged antisemitic bilge about the blood of Christian children being required as sacrifices for European Jews and their families –the kind of disgraceful drivel that has sadly once again found a home in our present-day. Further anticlericalism came in France 1902 when Emile Combes was elected to power. He was a provincial politician who had studied and planned to enter the priesthood only to eventually turn his back in bitter hatred of the Church and everything it stood for. His government was to banish various “unauthorized” religious groups. Persecutions were to follow –Catholic schools closed and thousands of priests, nuns, and monks were forced to flee France.
“Leo’s most significant work, however, was not political or diplomatic but sociological. He was the first pope to face up to the fact that the world had moved into an industrial age. It was not that the appearance of a teeming urban proletariat in Italy had somehow escaped the notice of his predecessor; Pius IX had been bitter indeed in his repeated attacks on socialism, nihilism, ad what he saw as other evils of the age. He had failed, on the other hand, to appreciate that this immense new working class was the responsibility of the Church, which was largely ignoring it. It was Leo who reopened the dialogue between them and introduced programs of social action… he also supervised the formation of Catholic trade unions, which also had a considerable success until in 1927 Benito Mussolini made voluntary withdrawal of labor a punishable offense” (421).
Pope Leo published his Rerum Novarum (May, 1891) which served as the Church’s belated response to Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. While rejecting class warfare, the pope had opened the door to future generations of Catholic socialists, supporting workers who were struggling against emerging industrialism. The energetic Pope Leo XIII died on July 20, 1903 at age ninety-nine. “Few popes had had to fight harder than he for the well-being –one might almost say the survival—of the Catholic Church in two leading nations of Europe which should have known better; and during his twenty-five-year struggle he had suffered many setbacks and disappointments. He could, however, look back on one tremendous achievement: he had proved that the pope, even when shorn of his temporal power, indeed even when ‘prisoner of the Vatican,’ could still be a potent force in the world. He had given the Papacy a new image and a prestige greater than it had enjoyed for many centuries” (422-423).
Pius X
Despite being a respected and revered figure, Pope Leo was not loved by his people. He was a strict ceremonialist, insisting that all of his visitors should kneel in his presence, forcing his entourage to remain standing, and declining to even speak to his own coachman. It’s not surprising that the conclave wanted a change when he passed so they elected Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto who took the name of Pius X –the first peasant pope since Sixtus V more than three centuries prior. A salt-of-the-earth figure, upon being crowned, Pius instituted a variety of reforms –streamlining the Curia, revising canon law, re-writing the breviary and the catechism, while pushing far-reaching changes to church music (calling for a return to Gregorian chats and plainsong).
“Pius X worked hard and achieved much, but he failed altogether to make an impact on Europe and the world in a way that Pius IX and Leo had done. He was too quiet, too humble, too holy, and his very holiness closed his mind to original thought. The Catholic intellectual theologians in Italy and France, Germany and England, doing their best to free religion from the shackles of medieval scholasticism and to reconcile their faith with the philosophical ideas and the thrilling scientific, historical, and archaeological discoveries that informed the opening century, found the pope not just unsympathetic but an active and implacable enemy” (424).
He published the Pascendi, which condemned “modernism” and all of its “heresies,” created the Society of St. Pius V (a secret police force), suppressed liberal Catholic newspapers, and pushed censorship and surveillance as well as persecution of liberals. He died a mere three weeks after the outbreak of World War I in July 1914. He was later formally declared to be saint in 1954 by Pope Pius XII, making Pius X the first pope to be elevated to this level since Pius V some four centuries before.
Benedict XV
The next pope was a Genoese aristocrat, Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, who took the papal name of Benedict XV. He was a small man in stature resulting from a dangerously premature birth, his papal robes would hang about him like a large, draping curtain.
“Benedict’s pontificate was doomed before it started, overshadowed as it had to be by the First World War. With so many of his flock fighting on each side he could assume only a position of the strictest neutrality, blaming both sides equally for the bloodshed ad devoting all his energies to bringing about an end to what he described as ‘this horrible butchery’ by means of a negotiated peace… Alas, strive as he might to be impartial, the inevitable result was that each side accused him of favoring the other –the Allies arguably having rather more reason to do so, since the Germans had actually offered, once the Italians were defeated, to help him recover temporal authority over Rome for the Papacy” (426).
The pope feared the spread of Eastern Orthodoxy from Russia, however following the Russian Revolution, Lenin declared war on religion and promptly subjected both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches to murderous persecutions. In spite of it all, the pope at least remained a committed humanitarian even if the government of Italy persuaded the Allies to reject the pope. Benedict unexpectedly died of influenza at the age of sixty-seven on January 22, 1922.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.